Monthly Archives: November 2014

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Below I post parts of a press release from Karriere-Jura GmbH, which is publishing the German text and a commentary to the German Civil Code free of charge online. There is no need to register.

The whole Code is online, but only some parts have been given commentaries so far – for a list and links see in the German text below.

The publisher is encouraging lawyers to post comments to the sections, which obviously has an advertising effect. For an example, scroll down on the page to § 1371.

This should be very useful for translators. Sometimes a text deals in great detail with a section of the BGB and a commentary is the ideal source of information. But more on commentaries in a future post.

If, like me, you are an alumna or alumnus of King’s College London and, unlike me, you wish to attend The Lifeboat Debate: who will save humanity?, you have a choice of titles to enter. In my case, Dr was preselected, but here are more (thanks, Alison!):

Boing Boing has been here before:Brit Airways’ honorifics kick United’s ass – not at King’s, that is, but at British Airways. Who have not the same list, although they do have Her Majesty. And a German has added material in a comment.

The University of Roehampton and JoSTrans are holding a one-day symposium in January on becoming a legal translator.

The former is in Barnes-ish according to Google Maps and calls itself ‘London’s campus university’. The latter I should have a link to already – it’s the Journal of Specialised Translation and its latest edition, the July one, has articles about translating crime fiction which may be of interest to readers of this blog. In fact I attended an excellent seminar run by Karen Seago for the CIoL which did not so much encourage me to translate crime fiction (although there are German crime novels) as to read more of it.

University of Roehampton and JoSTrans present a one-day event on Friday 9th January 2015 at the University of Roehampton, London

Becoming a Legal Translator: a symposium.

Thinking of becoming a legal translator? Already translating legal texts and keen to know more? Perhaps you are teaching on a legal translation course? This day of talks and workshops will feature speakers from a variety of backgrounds and with a wide range of experience in translating and interpreting. Highlights include keynote speeches from Richard Delaney and Juliette Scott, alongside interactive workshops on legal translation and translating for the EU. Please see attached for the full programme.

The symposium will take place in the Gilbert Scott Lecture Theatre, Whitelands College, on Friday 9th January 2015. Please join us for registration in the milling area outside the Gilbert Scott Lecture Theatre at 09:15 for a 09:45 start.

The concession fee for the symposium is £65.00 and the full conference fee is £95.00. To book a place, please visit the University of Roehampton online store by clicking here.

If you have any queries regarding the event, please contact Kristal Oakes (Academic Conferencing Co-ordinator) via email at kristal.oakes@roehampton.ac.uk

We look forward very much to welcoming you to the symposium and to seeing you there!​

21 people died from asphyxiation and 541 were injured at the Loveparade 2010 in Duisburg. It seems that the ground was suitable for 250,000 people and didn’t even reach capacity before there was a crush at the entrance between those coming in and those trying to leave. (Wikipedia German, Wikipedia English).

Apparently it is still not clear exactly how the accident occurred. The court commissioned a report from Professor G. Keith Still, Professor of Crowd Science at Manchester Metropolitan University, presumably to throw light on the sequence of events. This choice of expert witness was criticized as all the documents had to be translated into English for Professor Still and his report had to be translated back into German.

Criticism was directed at the delays in translation by the first agency, and also errors in the translation by the second agency. The second agency was commissioned in June 2012. On Friday November 14, Joachim Schwartz, the presiding judge of the 5th Duisburg Strafkammer, sent out three pages of criticism of errors.

What happened in detail in the translations?

1. We don’t know when the first agency was commissioned, just that June 2012 was regarded as too late. The events took place in June 2010, and after that the documents had to be translated and sent to Professor Still and he had to write his report before any translation could be commissioned.

The article states that the public prosecutors were sometimes unsatisfied with the time they had to wait for translations, and that deadlines were repeatedly breached. This suggests that the first agency was responsible for more than one translation – perhaps the DE>EN ones as well as the EN>DE one.

The report is available online as a PDF (21 pages, contains illustrations and photos). However, there was a later extended report, dated March 2013. This second report can be downloaded from the WAZ site here in four parts.

2. On November 14 the court, as stated above, criticized the second agency’s translation. The public prosecutor’s office is waiting to give the agency a chance to respond.

One part criticized is this (from the second report):

When did the loudspeaker system cease to be effective?

Original, referring to loudspeakers: “Their deployment and use is to inform the crowds but once the entry system failed and the crowds flowed in behind the police lines the situation was already beyond the point of no return.”

I was wondering what to do with Unterlassungsgläubiger in the case of a declaration of discontinuance. If it had been Unterlassungsschuldner, I could have used declarant, and I was tending here to the other party. But as usual I wondered what others had done.

Someone on Linguee had gone for ‘the party asserting the demand for restraint’, which is correct if nothing else.

There was no ProZ discussion but one on LEO looking for both terms. Someone there suggested respondent and claimant and seemed unfamiliar with German legal terminology:

Goodness me! that takes me back to CompuServe again – I recognize the technical translator’s name and location. I take the liberty of quoting a whole post from this presumably defunct blog:

Competition Law
Terminology I

In the short time that I have been busying myself with “Disclaimers” and “Cease-and-Desist orders”, I have come across a number of terms that, although I had no difficulty in understanding what they meant (at least well enough for a non-lawyer to get an idea of what it was all about, that is), nevertheless, I really had no idea of the accepted equivalents in British or American English (they are very likely not to be the same).

This is typical of what can happen to a technical translator from time to time. He/she gets the job of translating some boring machine manual, takes a quick look through before accepting but fails to notice that the customer has slipped in a few passages that are well outside his/her own area of expertise and there is nothing to be done about it but try to get help from somebody with an idea on the subject.

It took me well over my self-allotted 30 minutes weblog time today just to put the list together. I estimate that tracking down acceptable equivalents will take at least ten or twenty times as long! I am beginning to get a feeling that for a spare-time blogger, one or two terms per day would be quite enough to track down and document! In normal translation work, of course, while it is usual to make up a terminology list, it is not usual to do it in public! I am going to see what kind of a mess I can make of this. (It is now 2 a.m. again!)

0 of 13 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 starsCan’t read French
I ordered this edition by error. I couldn’t trace the English version. That will teach me to look at the description more closely.
Published 17 months ago by Leonard K

MacGregor studied German at Oxford, has a lifelong passion for German history and culture, and a keen sense of their role in what makes Europe tick. These are important matters, more than worthy of greater attention, and MacGregor’s commitment shines through in the radio series, which clearly announces itself as a personal view. In the exhibition, however, this sense of identification coupled with MacGregor’s weighty professional role lends the show an oddly official air, as though it were being bankrolled by the Goethe Institute. While there’s no evidence of any such involvement parts of the show have the worthily dated air of expo exhibition stands.

The whole thing is idiosyncratic. It purports to relate to the reunified Germany which has only existed for 25 years, but it goes back hundreds of years and emphasizes the earlier larger Germany (Basel, Strasbourg, Kaliningrad; nice historical political maps) and there plenty of Luther, Holbein, Dürer, some nice Riemenschneider apostles too, in so far as a manageable exhibition with such a broad sweep can get anywhere. I didn’t so much feel there was too much text as that I didn’t feel I’d come to an exhibition with this title to read about Goethe’s Farbenlehre or the development of Meissen porcelain. I’m also not sure what ‘memories of a nation’ is supposed to mean.

It wasn’t necessary to book, and there were not too many problems of the present ubiquitous barrier of headphone wearers following the audio guide.

Some things were new to me or particularly struck me.

The model of Friedrichstrasse station created to train Stasi officials (picture in the book too). We used to cross there in 1967-1968, and a friend of mine was subjected to a body search and turned up on the East Berlin side with twenty minutes’ delay. I had no idea how it was constructed then, and looking at the model doesn’t help much now. Dr. Sabine Beneke of the Deutsches Historisches Museum is quoted (this is a building when another English friend and I were almost mown down in 1967 because we failed to see the goose-stepping soldiers patrolling in front of it):

‘I made the journey from West to East Berlin several times. … You can see clearly on the model that the station was constructed in a deliberately complex way. The spaces are divided up by very tall walls to give the effect of a labyrinth. There was no clear orientation. You can see the different train tracks were completely separated, so tracks which operated within the East German side were kept separate from those which ran through to the West German side or beyond. As you moved from the train to the exit, you kept having to change direction and change level. You went into small doors and then large spaces, then small spaces, and everyhwere in the model you can see the high windows in which observation agents or cameras were placed.’

I didn’t realize the lettering on the Buchenwaldgate, which I’ve seen in situ (combines well with a trip to Weimar) was Bauhaus style.

Mutter Courage’s handcart, which I’d forgotten about – the Leiterwagen is perhaps typically German, and I used one to move house in the same road in 1984.

Barlach’s angel – I didn’t realize the original was melted down as entartete Kunst in the Third Reich.

I wasn’t aware that the only triumphant leader who marched through the Brandenburg Gate was Napoleon.

There is masses of material touched on in the exhibition: the Grimms, Caspar David Friedrich, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, the tradition of crafts and trades – but all these things are more the material for a book. The book is huge and richly illustrated and worth getting hold of.

According to an email published on the website UFOSightingsDaily.com – which does a regular trade in alien sightings – this mission is part of a European Space Agency and Nasa cover-up to disguise the comet’s true alien nature.

It seems that the adjective legendary is applied to German bakers and pastry chefs. Actually, legendary pastry chef is a thing. Although even legendary translator gets a few ghits.

Konditor and Cook (thanks, Trevor!) have been around for a while and have a book.

Here is a brain meringue which I didn’t try:

The best-looking thing in the window was a home-made Victoria sponge. The Spectator writes:

Konditor and Cook (Ebury, £20, Spectator Bookshop, £18) is the book of an Anglo-German cake shop, which, given the excellence of German cakes, is oddly rare on the scene here. Gerhard Jenne is notable for his quirky decorations and humorous take on fondant fancies and you get a fair share of jolly stuff here, but there are also things like plum streusel in the German fashion. It’s all delicious, but I should warn you that some of the cake bases are quite dense, the cooking times aren’t always geared to domestic ovens and there’s a variation on a Victoria sponge (extra egg yolk, added crème fraiche) which comes squarely into the category of gilded lilies.

There’s another legendary German Konditormeister in Edinburgh, Falko Burkert. Stern borrows heavily from the Observer:

Down here in London we pay the same for salted and unsalted butter, but perhaps it’s different when you’re bulk-buying. There’s plenty of marzipan with 30% almonds in Germany. In fact I seem to recall that 54% is the best I could get. It actually says here that Lübecker Marzipan by Niederegger has 70% Marzipanrohmasse, but then the Rohmasse already contains sugar, so that doesn’t mean 30% almonds, does it? And Falko should be capable of asking for plain flour rather than self-raising.

For a 37-year-old, Falko is curiously old-fashioned in his instincts. He is both passionate and inspiring in his belief that time-honoured, labour-intensive, artisan skills can never be replaced by machines. He elevates taste over aesthetics. ‘I want to eat cakes, not look at them,’ he says. ‘A cake should not look like an overdecorated Christmas tree.’

His style is all about restrained amounts of sugar and subtle flavours. He will have no truck with the technological armoury used by most modern bakers, refusing, for example, to use a proving machine to speed up the making of his breads and insisting that all sponges are raised by hand in the orthodox German manner by beating air into the eggs, not with the addition of raising agents.